The invention relates to a charge-coupled device comprising a charge transport channel, of which at least a part is provided with separation regions, by which this part of the channel is subdivided into n subchannels, by means of which a quantity of supplied charge Q is subdivided during transport through this part of the channel into n subcharges Q.sub.j, where j=1 . . . n and n an integer larger than 2.
The invention is of particular importance for filters, such as, for example, transversal filters, in which incoming signals are weighted, delayed and summed. In charge-coupled devices of the kind described above, the weighting factors associated with the different delay times are obtained by subdividing the incoming signal Q (t) into subsignals Q.sub.i (t), which are each transported through the charge-coupled device with an individual delay time.
Also for other circuits, the principle of charge distribution in the charge transport channel of the charge-coupled device can be used, as in situations in which a signal has to be subjected to different operations, where each component of the subdivided input signal can be used for one of the said operations.
A charge-coupled device of the kind described in the opening paragraph is known inter alia from the European Patent Application No. 040423 laid open to public inspection. It is suggested in this Application to obtain a given desired charge distribution via a binominal sequence, in which in a number of successive stages a charge packet is each time subdivided into two equal parts, one of which can be summed with a component or composite component of preceding distributions until the correct charge distribution is obtained. In this manner, an accurate distribution can be obtained, which is practically independent of process tolerances. A disadvantage of this method is that, in order to obtain given charge distributions, a large number of subdivisions and hence a charge-coupled device of great length and often also great width are required with all the inherent disadvantages with respect to, for example, space, dissipation and signal smearing due to transport losses.